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The earliest and most persistent question that came to my mind while growing up in a strict Baptist household and a very religious family was why do we use God to excuse so many man-made things, so much man-made misery? People in my family, community and race attribute to God a lot of things which are ungodly, and then claim that God will straighten them out in the by-and-by. We seem not to want to understand that God did not mess things up in the first place. We have made a folklore out of this limited view of God and out of God-dependency as a spiritual necessity when we gave up on ourselves or others. We say that we have done all you can for them and then leave them alone. God will fix it by-and-by. Why must God fix something that God did not initiate and did not cause? What kind of God is this, or, more precisely, what kind of faith is this?

I believe that if God was merciful enough to give you a brain, two functioning hands, and two legs where you put one in front of the other, then God has given you the facility to take care of yourself, to be responsible for your actions and for what happens to you. This is as self-evident to me as abilities to taste and to distinguish between a flower and an ear of corn. We use God as an excuse for not taking responsibility for our lives. This was not an anti-God argument. We have drawn the wrong conclusions from religion. Instead of being a source of liberation, our religions have become psychological traps. It is ironic that people have to leave religion as it was (and still is) practiced in order to understand and appreciate its meaning and to enjoy its benefits.

While in Baptist Sunday school, I began to look at the images they presented of God—that God was all loving, and that God was universal. If these claims are true, why do some people work very little and have so much, and why do others work so hard and have so little? If he is merciful, show me the mercy in this case? As a child, I could not ask these questions externally because I would be slapped down and it was impolite. I would be called "child of the devil."

Something grew in me early that I would have to grow to adulthood to understand. I am as religious as any person on earth and I had something that was above religion—spirituality! I was spiritual and that spirituality is the big umbrella under which religions function and out of which religions came. To be truly spiritual makes you a part of all religions without having to adhere to the mythology in any of them. But while growing up I had to brood and keep these impressions to myself. I had not worked out the images of all those white angels, a white God and white saints. I could not understand how of all the people who died down through the years, why not a single black or brown person got into heaven? Heaven was snow-white and even the devil was red.

What I grew up brooding over and confused by were the millions of impressions, ideas, and beliefs that see myself and my people outside the context of history. It appeared that we had no place in history, no place in religion, had contributed nothing to civilization and, therefore, could not exist or be acknowledge as of value as human beings in the present. This is what drove me to study history seriously and at an early age in my life. After reading the Bible my curiosity led me to encyclopedias, almanacs, and out of town newspapers. I used to even read movie magazines. Since I had good memory, I could remember the names of all of the movie stars, as well as the names of the stars' wives. This was pure nonsense and rubbish of no meaning to black people or to anyone else. Devoting my mind to nonsense occurred in school as well. Because I was a good student, I had to memorize all of the state capitals. I had to ask essential questions inside myself amidst a clutter of irrelevant information that those around seemed to think important.

When it became apparent to me that I wanted to do more serious reading, I left "Jim Crow" Columbus, Georgia, when I was eighteen. There was very little to hold me since my mother had died in 1922 when I was about seven. She was from the Mays family out of which came the famous baseball player, Willie Mays. My father's income was not enough for us to survive on. So she earned extra money as a washerwoman taking in white people's laundry. She did whole bundles from one white family for one dollar—wash and iron. Sometimes they would throw in the soap. Now, these same white people would call us "lazy people" on welfare. Yet for 300 years during our slavery and during "Jim Crow," white people were on welfare, and we paid for it.

After my mother nearly worked herself to death, I will never forget seeing her in that racially segregated hospital. The hospital was totally inadequate and it stank, literally stank. No one deserved to be put in such a place. But there she was, a beautiful woman, dying needlessly because whites denied us access to adequate hospital facilities. She died from pellagra, a disease caused by insufficient diet. It was bad enough being poor, but it was far worse being regarded as so utterly worthless as not even to deserve to be alive.

My mother was a beautiful quiet woman, who loved all of her children and tried to keep it a secret that I was her personal favorite. She told me so on her last day in the hospital. I knew that she would never come home. I hate hospitals to this day. Despite our short time together, she and two other women helped me to form a positive concept of myself. Besides my mother, there was my great grandmother who witnessed the last slaves bought over from Africa, and finally there was my fifth grade teacher who taught me to believe in myself. I feel the presence of those three women even today.

My mother's death was not the only event that prompted me to leave the South. There was my own circumstance. After my mother died. My father went back to Union Springs, Alabama, chose another wife, and returned to Columbus, Georgia. I finished grammar school, and then I had to work because my family needed my financial support. Our poverty did not care that I was a good student. My jobs were to haul wood and take breakfast to my father and his co-workers. He worked in a brickyard where the men had to go to work very early. I would go to their houses, take their breakfasts to the men, and then go to school. There were six men. At the end of the week, I would get five cents from each. So I made 30 cents a week.

I was fortunate to be able to go to school at all. Only one child in each family living outside the city limits could go to the city school because you had to pay $3.75 for a book fee. My father only made $12 to $15 per week and we needed every penny of it. So I was the one chosen from my family. All of my brothers and sisters believe to this day that they should have been chosen to go to school. For example, the last time I saw my brother, Alvin, in Detroit, we were eating together and I answered a question for his wife. He said smugly, "my brother went to the city school"—meaning that I had a terrible advantage over him.

I read as much as I could by picking up books from the white people I worked for and by borrowing books. Most of these white people had books for decoration and had not read them. I would go to the public library as if I was on an errand for a white person. Blacks could not use the library at the time. I would forge their name to take books out. My experience just calls to mind that the story has yet to be told of what black people in the South did in order to survive. We lived in an atmosphere tantamount to Nazism right here in the U.S. I swore that I would get out of the South when I could. Eighteen years was long enough.

Being "Taken In"

Miss Roselee took me in. She was a maid and cook in one of the white homes that I did chores in. I went to Miss Roselee and stayed there for four years. She had an old boarding-house that was an undeclared house of prostitution. That did not faze me because the ladies were nice to me and gave me school, lunch and church money. "Taking in" was a custom and substitute for adoption among blacks in the South. "Taking in" a young person was part of our humanity that we then took for granted and has now passed from us unnoticed. This was part of our extended family practices. But now extended families can no longer afford to do this for economic reasons.

We have not discussed "taking in" and other indigenous customs as part of how we survived. How is it that people would just take in a child with no paperwork and raise that child as their own straight up into manhood or womanhood, ask no questions, and not be compensated in any way? The people who explain blacks to white people have ignored our customs, and the things we did to survive and, in doing so, have done black people a great disservice. Clearly, I was better off "taken in" at a house of prostitution than I was at home because of our poverty. While "taken in" I was able to go to school where I completed the eighth grade.

I traveled by boxcar to Chicago in an unsuccessful attempt to get into the World's Fair in 1932. If you did not know anyone in Chicago to stay with and had no money, the police would not let you enter the city. I found myself back on a freight-train and on my way to Jersey City—a nickel ferry ride from New York City. I have lived in New York for over 50 years. What attracted me initially was the opportunity to go to WPA school at night. It did not matter then whether or not I graduated from high school. What was important to me was that I could read anything I wanted and as much as I could and could question anyone. My readings and associations led me to further questioning.

Radical Associations

I was immediately drawn to radical elements. They were the only ones who acknowledge our plight and attempted to do anything about it. I became active in the Young Communist League. I was never a member of the Communist Party, contrary to what many believed. As a matter of principle, if I had been a member of the Communist Party, I would have said so unashamedly. I was active with radicals who were committed to doing something. This is where those who claimed that I was a communist got mixed up. There were communist-sponsored activities where non-communists like myself were more effective and more active. For example, I was active in the Scottsboro and Angelo Herndon cases as a young street speaker and fundraiser. I was at the rallies and did things automatically.

My first act with the Young Communist League was to prevent Henry Winston and family from being evicted from their Lower East Side apartment. The law was written in such a way that if you are evicted and someone put your things back in the house, the marshal had to wait another thirty days to give you another eviction notice. In three days you could find another place to stay. So I was head of a group of young Turks who put their furniture back in the house. Henry and I remained friends, though we had some strong disagreements about Marxism.

When Henry wrote his book, Strategy for a Black Agenda, I was the only one to raise the question of whose black agenda? I had arrived at an important position in the 1930s—a position that has been verified by events in the communist world today. Communism and socialism were not monoliths to be applied in the same way in all nations. Each country will have to approach socialism based on its own needs and character. Poland is a good example. No matter how communist Poland becomes, they are going to remain Catholic. You can say religion is the opiate of the people and I might agree with you, but that will not change anything. Poles are going to remain Catholic. You can declare that Russia is an atheist nation all you want, but there are going to continue to be millions of religious people in Russia, including 30 million Moslems. I told Henry and other communists that they had to work from reality, not their ideological declarations. So if black people become socialist, we become Baptist socialists, Methodist socialists, holy-roller socialists, Father Divine socialists, and Moslem socialists. That is reality.

But a more telling critique of the left is in the study of African tribal societies—a study that Karl Marx missed. It is very clear that African tribal societies have successfully functioned for their people far longer than any nation devised by European thinkers. These tribal societies in their structure and administration were fundamentally socialist. They were socialist not only before Karl Marx was born, but before Europe was born. They did not wait for someone to ordain them "socialist" and say that they were "socialist." They never said once that they were socialist—they did not have to. Examine African tribal societies before they were interfered with by foreigners. There is nothing in socialism that they did not have. Africans had the purest form of socialism that ever existed on this earth.

So I have no problem with socialism if you take it from its African universal base. But if you take it solely from its European base, then I have an extreme problem with it. Then it is still based on the assumption of European dominance of the world. What European ideologies of the left and right do not understand is that they assume continued European dominance. They believe that, if the world is to be socialist, it will be socialist under European dominance. If it is to be capitalist, it is to be capitalist under European dominance. I have problems with both assumptions. In contrast, if Africa had built its own enduring socialist societies all over the continent, it would be evident by no network of jails, no psychiatrists, no orphanages, and no old people's homes.

All of the social services we in the West have built outside the family would exist inside the family if the West had any kind of humanity. African tribal societies were far beyond where we in the West are right now and beyond where we say we hope to go. So it is time to examine what Africans had as a basis that we still need. Clearly we need to stop calling African societies "primitive." If they were primitive, why is it that their social order came before and has outlived every form of government and social order that this alleged Western civilization has ever devised? The key to all of our salvations as a people here, in Africa, and in Europe may be in the social wisdom of African tribal peoples.

Harlem Street Speakers

When I came to New York I first learned of the Harlem "street speakers." I do not know of any other place in the country where there was this tradition. The "street speakers" were men who stood on street corners expounding on the topics of the day. They had to be knowledgeable, relevant, good speakers, and able to hold their own, because their audiences were not passive. People would speak up from the crowd, and boo them away if they were outdone. The speakers on Lenox Avenue were considered to be the junior or "undergraduate" speakers. The Speakers on Seventh Avenue were the senior graduate speakers—the elite. You had to speak first on Lenox Ave. And could do so for years before you could get to Seventh Ave.

On Lenox Ave. there was Ras DeKiller, who I believe became the role model for the street speaker in Ralph Ellison's book, Invisible Man. On Seventh Ave., Arthur Reed was king and trained a young man named Ira Kemp. He sold dresses made by his family from door to door. Ira Kemp became the king of street speakers. Also on Seventh Ave. there was a young Dominican named Carlos Cook—arrogant as hell and a good speaker. Unknown to the audience, Cook's people owned brownstone houses in Harlem and were slum landlords. I coined the phrase "Carlos Cook is a crook." When he saw me in his audience, he would start blasting away, "we got to get rid of the traitors in our midst." When I would say something, he would turn towards me and say that "this man is a disgrace to the skin he wears." I was the only one to say that Carlos Cook was a hustler. Nonetheless, he was a very effective speaker and had a segment of the Garvey Movement in his following. Unfortunately, Cook and his Garveyite following misinterpreted Garvey. Carlos Cook passed on about 10 years ago.

My formal introduction to history began in Harlem in the 1930s. I was active in the Harlem history club at the Harlem YMCA under Willis N. Huggins. I was fortunate enough to have met Arthur Schomburg and remembered reading his famous essay "The Negro Digs up His Past" while I was still in Georgia. I can say that it was Arthur Schomburg who taught me the interrelation of African history to world history. Willis N. Huggins taught me the political meaning of history. I would go to the lectures of William Leo Hansberry on the philosophical meaning of black history. The Harlem History Club was literally a graduate level history department with some of the most important figures in black history right there in the middle of Harlem. I learned all that I could.

Some of the club's publications would include John G. Jackson's and Willis Huggins', "A Guide to the Study of African History." In this work, the references on Africa alone made it an important contribution. Besides his essay "The Negro Digs up His Past," Schomburg wrote a book entitled The New Negro. Huggins and Jackson later wrote an Introduction to African Civilization. I was being introduced to material and books I had never seen or heard of before. This would lead me to read more deeply. It might surprise you that H.G. Wells' Outline of History, despite its white supremacist views, is a good outline of history. It led me to read other works in history like Spingler's Decline of the West and the early works of Will Durant—the seven-volume Story of Philosophy.

John G. Jackson's works still have a great influence on me and this is evident in my inquiry into the role of religion as a force in history and the African origins of the legend of the Garden of Eden. He was one of the earliest scholars who attempted to separate myth from truth in biblical history. See his book Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth as well as his pamphlet Christianity Before Christ—later made into a book. His writing indicates that in some cases biblical stories were not true and were not meant to be true. The bible was meant to provide fables and myth to illustrate the truth. If you understand the truth from the illustrations, the bible has done what it was meant to do. For example, the story of the Exodus is told to illustrate that, at a given hour, God will come to the rescue of his people. It is a story on the ultimate goodness of God to rescue his people in their most desperate time. If you have real faith in yourself and God, the story is nothing more than that and has served its purpose.

Of particular value to me were William Hansberry's "Sources for the Study of Ethiopian History" and the writings of Charles Seiford, especially his unpublished "Who Are the Ethiopians?" In addition to the historic readings, I enjoyed a lot of good general writings such as the early fiction of Richard Wright. In fact, my writing style has been influenced by the white writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and other great writers who tried to take their writing into other dimensions that otherwise would not have been.

Dedication

I appreciate people with insight, white or black, who have looked for the fifth side of a four-sided square. This is what I have learned from writers who write well and thinkers who think well. Many young people, and older ones as well, have not developed the sense of challenge to seek out and find other people who do things well. We can all benefit from being exposed to the masters and respect the fact that what they do is something well done. Unfortunately, many scholars and writers today do not see the standard that they have to move up to. I am clearly partial to the works, writings, and thinking of our people's freedom movement, but I have no hesitation in going outside the movement to get any truth, idea, or theory that I think will add to what I have learned from my own people.

The writers and scholars in the Harlem history club were good writers and scholars, who were dedicated to their people and to history. They had little comfort or financial advantage. Being scholars meant that they had to pursue their work and live with economic uncertainty. There was uncertainty in their personal relations as well. They were expected to be ordinary men with ordinary interests when they were in fact extraordinary in who they were and what they did. They were not masochistic, yet many of them suffered at the hands of their wives, children and friends. Despite lack of support and misunderstanding from those closest to them, they stuck to what they set out to do as men of dedication.

The necessity for dedication was expressed some years ago by an Englishman named Edmund O'Brian. He said "thinking is at its best when you make a priesthood out of duty." A writer could not do his best work before he understood the priesthood of his endeavor. You cannot express ideas well externally until you have made sense of them internally. All of the external material measures of success do not motivate or really reward the dedicated scholar. I know O'Brian's point well. My deepest disappointment has not been financial or for the years that I could not get a teaching position. My disappointment was in the lack of support from the two women I married.

Teaching

For years I could not get a regular teaching job. I taught in high schools, in the community, and in odd-ball places in the Depression years and after I came out of the Army in 1945. I did odd jobs for almost 20 years to support myself, my family, and my historical studies and research. Finally, in 1949, the administrator at the New School for Social Research had to fund an African Studies Center and I was allowed to give courses in the community. Later, I became head of the heritage teaching programme for Haryou Act, the first anti-poverty programme in Harlem. Then I was training head-start teachers at New York University.

All of these positions were on soft money lines. When the grant ran out, the job ran out. I could get those kind of jobs. I became known for my radical approach to teaching and as a teacher who documented things and proved my points. Sometimes I would work in the bank at night to supplement my income. Then James Turner expressed an interest in me coming to Cornell University and the black and Puerto Rican students at Hunter College wanted me to develop their curriculum as well. I was making a little money then as a consultant for CBS and was not ready to teach yet. So I told the Dean at Hunter College that I would do two courses for $15,000 thinking they would tell me to go to hell. They accepted. To my Surprise I was hired at Hunted College and, for the first time in my life. I was paid $15,000 per year to teach two courses. The students told them to hire me and this was not a time when administrations ignored their students' wishes.